MOSCOW (MRC) -- Royal Dutch Shell plans to start producing low-carbon jet fuel at scale by 2025, in an attempt to encourage the world's airlines to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reported Reuters.
Aviation, accounting for 3% of the world's carbon emissions, is considered one of the toughest sectors to tackle due to a lack of alternative technologies to jet fueled-engines.
Shell, one of the world's largest oil traders, said it aims to produce 2 million tons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) by 2025, a ten-fold increase from today's total global output.
Produced from waste cooking oil, plants and animal fats, SAF could cut up to 80% of aviation emissions, Shell said.
Shell, which at present only supplies SAF produced by others, including Finnish refiner Neste, said on Monday it wants green jet fuel, which can be blended with regular aviation fuel with little need to change plane engines, to make up 10% of its global aviation fuel sales by 2030.
SAF accounts for less than 0.1% of today's global aviation fuel demand, which reached around 330 million tons in 2019, investment bank Jefferies said.
Growing the market faces several hurdles, primarily due to the cost of SAF, which is currently up to 8 times higher than regular jet fuel, and the limited availability of feedstock.
Shell said it wants others to follow its lead.
"We also expect other companies to add to it with their own production plants," Anna Mascolo, head of Shell Aviation, told Reuters.
The United States said last week it wants to cut aircraft greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% by the end of the decade by significantly boosting SAF usage.
Anglo-Dutch shell, which aims to reduce emissions from fuels it sells to net zero by 2050, is in the midst of a large overhaul aimed at producing more low-carbon fuels such as biodiesel and SAF, as well as hydrogen. Shell plans to build a biofuels processing plant at its Rotterdam refinery with an annual capacity of 820,000 tons, with SAF set to make up more than half of the output. The plant is expected to start production in 2024.
In a new report on the decarbonisation of aviation published together with Deloitte, Shell called for the sector to cut its emissions to net zero by 2050.
As MRC informed earlier, Royal Dutch Shell plans to reduce its refining and chemicals portfolio by more than half, it said in July 2020 without giving a precise timeframe. The move is part of the Anglo-Dutch company's plan to shrink its oil and gas business and expand its renewables and power division to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sharply by 2050.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
MRC